Texting is a great way to quickly and easily reach out to contacts and provide them with helpful information.

The key to a successful texting experience is that is needs to be a mutual and positive relationship between you and the contact. That's where opt-ins come in.

This can come in many different forms including a form on your website, included in registration pages, sent via email or even shared through social media. The goal of these opt-in's is all about receiving explicit written consent in order to message your contacts.

So why do you have to collect opt-in's?

It's a part of federal law in order to limit the amount of SPAM that exists in text messages or phone calls. This law is called the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, you can read more about that here.

The long and short of it is, you need permission from your contacts before you text them.

Here is the short checklist of what you need in order to collect opt-ins.

At the bottom of the article, you'll find an FAQ about consent.

Your call to action is the way in which you tell people to participate in your SMS program.

Whether it's an...

You are always going to be telling them to opt in. You are calling them to action, the action being opting into receiving texts from you.

The Call-to-Action can be simple. The primary purpose is to ensure that a Contact consents to receive a message and understands the nature of what they will receive.

The Call-to-Action needs to include the following:

The below is an example of a Call to Action that includes all of the above items.

Ultimately, you are just trying to reduce the risk of someone receiving an unwanted message. By making contacts opt-in before sending them messages, you are ensuring that no one gets a text without consent!

We just we just went over what a call to action looks like. Now, we're going to go over a few ways that someone can opt-in to your messages.

The example in the previous section was a keyword, so we'll start there.

This is by far the most simple to implement and the one we recommend.

In addition to being simple to set up, they're extremely easy for your audience to engage with.

A keyword may be something like "SUBSCRIBE" or "OPTIN". This qualifies as explicit written consent to receive messages from you whether they are for promotional or informational purposes.

It allows for your audience to text a phrase into your number and receive an automatic response. Remember, you'll need to format your Call to Action to follow these standards.

To learn more about setting up Keyword Autoresponders in MessageDesk, you can visit the below article.

Do you have a website? This may be the option for you.

With Forms in MessageDesk, you can send the form as a link or embed it directly on your website if you're comfortable adding code to your website.

Forms are a great way to collect an opt-in from your audience as well as collect contact information.

You can format your form to collect all the necessary information you need as well as an automatic response when the form is submitted. Remember, you'll need to format your response message to follow these standards.

A chatbot is extremely similar to a form. It's designed to collect contact information and then send out an automatic text response.

It's a small icon that sits on the bottom corner of your website.

When you click on it, it will ask for the contact information similar to a form.

Once submitted, it will send an automatic message that confirms that the person has opted into text messages.

To learn more about setting up chatbots in MessageDesk, you can read the article below.

You can collect text message consent on you POS system or your online store.

Here are some popular POS system providers where you can collect and get consent for messages:

A paper form can be used to collect explicit written consent from contacts.

Remember, it will need to follow the guidelines for a Call to Action shown in the previous section.

Here are some questions that we frequently get about consent!

If you don't have a website, we highly recommend you utilize keywords. They don't require any setup outside of the keyword itself and doesn't require additional resources.

You may want to create marketing materials that advertise your keyword.

You need to collect opt-ins to verify that your contacts actually want to be receiving your messages. It's also the law, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act requires you to collect express written consent to send marketing messages.

To learn more about why you need to collect opt-in, check out this article.

Registration is only part of remaining compliant. This is how your business is registered with the carriers to be approved to send messages.

You still need to get consent from your audience in order to send messages to them.